1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a sales territory planning and targeting tool that displays install base, competitive and opportunity information in a graphical format, and allows the user to generate target contact lists based on subsets of the data in their territory.
2. Description of the Related Art
Sales persons within an organization are typically assigned a territory (geographical or by industry, for example) in which to sell their employer's products or services. How well the sales representatives know their territory is often directly proportional to their sales as well as to their compensation. To keep track of the products or services they have sold to their customers, sales representatives often employ a series of manually maintained spreadsheets detailing the sales information.
When sales representatives leave their employer, they tend to take these spreadsheets with them, thereby depriving the former employer of the intelligence they may have gathered during their tenure with the company. The next sales representative, therefore, may have to again gather this information, as well as gather all information regarding the competitive landscape of their assigned sales territory.
There is a need, therefore, for a centralized repository of such sales information that survives changes in the sales force (e.g., departures of sales representatives or the addition of sales representatives).
When sales representatives call on their customers (in person, over the phone or over the Web), they seek to learn as much about the customer as they can, in the hope of identifying potential sales opportunities. Usually, the most important information to be gathered concerns unmet needs that the customer may have. For example, the customer may have purchased a database from one vendor and an Accounts Receivable (AR) application from another. However, the sales representative may have determined, through conversations with the customer, that the customer currently lacks a financial reporting tool that interfaces with the database provided by the first vendor. This would be termed an opportunity and the sales representative may attempt to sell the customer a suitable product from the offerings of his or her employer to fill this identified customer need.
When a sales representative is assigned a new account, he or she may record the information related thereto in a spreadsheet. A row of the spreadsheet may be assigned to the customer company and the columns of the spreadsheet may be assigned to the products that the sales representative sells. All of these cells (intersections of the rows and columns) are white (blank) to start off with (hence the term “whitespace”) and the sales representative is supposed to ask the customer questions until he or she is able to fill all of the whitespaces with the appropriate information. The account is then considered to be fully mapped. However, the sales representative does not typically track the customer's installed base of products, other than described above. For example, the sales representative conventionally does not make entries in his or her spreadsheet relative to products from competitors or non-competitors already installed at the customer site, as no opportunities exist for such products. The existing sales information gathering and tracking methodologies, therefore, do not paint a complete picture of the sales representative's customers existing installed product or services base. Moreover, such incomplete picture is not persistent (often disappearing along with the sales representative as the sales representative leaves for another job), and is not typically available to others within the sales representative's sales organization. Therefore, potential opportunities may be lost and the employer may lose potential sales and the next sales representative may lose potential commissions.
From the foregoing, it is clear that there is a need for greater consolidation of customer information, in terms of eliminating redundancy of customer data in ERP and CRM systems (for example), in terms of sales representative territory assignment and in terms of competitive and install base data to eliminate unnecessary redundancy and provide richer access to central sales information.